Fleeting shapes without contour

"À propos, sometimes when we address a woman," continued the buttoned-up Walter Frommer, "we might gain the impression that she replies sensibly and thinks as we do. But that is an illusion. They imitate" — he placed special emphasis on the word imitate —  "our way of communicating, and one cannot deny that some of them are very good at it."

A bunch of ailing (and pompous and wildly irrational) men take the cure: mill about, drink, and philosophize like they're the centre of the universe. Is it Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain or The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, by Olga Tokarczuk? Why not both? Here, Tokarczuk imitates Mann (and she's very good at it), imbuing her telling with feminism, forest folk, and that old-timey feel.

There was something wrong with these mothers; it was if they did a terribly dangerous job, risking their lives in their boudoirs and bedrooms, tangled in lace, leading a lethal existence among the bedclothes and the copper pans, among the towels, powders and stacks of menus for every day of the year. In Mieczysław Wojnicz's family world, the women had vague, short, dangerous lives, and then they died, remaining in people's memories as fleeting shapes without contour. They were reduced to a remote, unclear impulse placed in the universe only temporarily, for the sole purpose of its biological consequences.

The misogynistic views on women expressed by these pompous male characters are debasing and ridiculously outdated, but according to the Author's Note, they are all paraphrased from texts by these authors: Augustine of Hippo, Bernard of Cluny, William S. Burroughs, Cato, Joseph Conrad, Charles Darwin, Emile Durkheim, Henry Fielding, Sigmund Freud, H. Rider Haggard, Hesiod, Jack Kerouac, D.H. Lawrence, Cesare Lombroso, W. Somerset Maugham, John Milton, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ovid, Plato, Ezra Pound, Jean Racine, Francois de La Rochefoucauld, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Schopenhauer, William Shakespeare, August Strindberg, Jonathan Swift, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Semonides of Amorgos, Tertullian, Thomas Aquinas, Richard Wagner, Frank Wedekind, John Webster, Otto Weininger and William Butler Yeats.

(I'm including the full list because it's shocking and true.)

As in the windows of a huge room, in his mind's eye he could see the shapes his future would take. There were so many possibilities that he felt strength gathering within him, but he could not find the words; all that entered his head was the German phrase "Ich will", but this was something greater that went beyond the usual "Ich". He felt plural, multiple, multifaceted, compound and complicated like a coral reef, like a mushroom spawn whose actual existence is located underground.

Is this a horror novel? In several ways, yes. There is a creeping dread, when a hand feels blindly through the moss, when mushrooms are foraged and consumed. Night noises, a strange attic, a dark forest, and some very distasteful meals. There are mysterious deaths. Mob mentality. Whom can one trust? Are these men who they say they are? There is the horror men feel at the witchery of women, and the horror that men actually thought this way. 

See also
Review
Excerpt: Woman, Frog, and Devil 

The slow and leisurely rot of a day

The imaginary anthropologist remained with me after I finished university. I would summon her to narrate the simplest interactions when I tried to untangle the layers of an argument, when I edited footage, when I was dressing up for an event. I called on the anthropologist to examine our lives as we moved from place to place, where we were never natives. What would she write down in her pad if asked to study Manu and me as a tribe of our own? Trained as she was to identify the ways of people rooted in their homes, their language and customs, what would the tiny anthropologist point to in our makeshift apartments, where we lived without a shared native tongue, without religion, without the web of family and its obligations to keep us in place? What would she identify as our rituals and ties of kinship, the symbols that constituted a sense of the sacred and the profane?

Because it often seemed to me that our life was unreal, and I summoned the anthropologist to make it seem otherwise.

The Anthropologists, by Ayşegül Savaş, concerns itself with two people having a relationship in a language that is not either of their own, in the city they each independently chose to exile themselves to. 

Where?, I wonder, and I make assumptions. At some point it becomes clear that their shared tongue is not English. I make a game of guessing the language and city; for a minute I imagine them living in a neighbourhood just north of me. (But it's not Montreal, it turns out; rather, Paris, and I realize I haven't been in a very long time, and I want to go.)

It makes me nostalgic, remembering what it is to make a life for oneself, by oneself, away from one's family, and then together with someone else, and the life you make with the people you choose to be your family. 

We recognized in him something we recognized in each other: the mix of openness and suspicion; a desire to establish rules by which to live, and only a vague idea about what those rules should be.

He found them at flea markets and on the street, always with an idea of ways he would put them to use, though he never did. His true passion was collection, the accumulation of expired things, their foggy poetry.

It makes me more generally nostalgic for youth, for having to make do, for carefully choosing one's indulgences. For deciding what kind of person one wants to be, living in that neighbourhood, having those things, knowing these people.

After a day of hanging out in the park:

I love a good day of rotting, Ravi said,
That's what I wanted to film. The slow and leisurely rot of a day.

Those are the best days. "I knew little beyond the fact that I wanted to film daily life." (Remarkably, I am soon thereafter reading Pond, which is nothing but daily life. If there is a theme to my reading this year it might be this, the mundane.)

It's a little bit about living outside of oneself, like all writers do, while looking on usually kindly, and at least honestly. The Anthropologists charmed me.

We sensed smugness in the foreigners' repeated disclaimer that they were doing work on themselves, as if the psyche were a house for remodeling, its parts identifiable as rooms and walls and beams, its leaks and fissures possible to fix. And it seemed there was always a limit to how genuinely we would be able to know them, because the constant calibration of their own well-being wouldn't allow true intimacy.

I discovered this novel when it showed up on Barack Obama's list of 2024 favourites, and I read it in February 2025.

Excerpts 
Future Selves (published as a short story) 
Daily Life 
Anthropology  

Review
Everyday Magic (Massachusetts Review): "preserves time and room to make art out of daily life, not just survive it."

Also:

Her dedication to the “infraordinary” has evocations of Lauren Elkin’s No. 91/92: diary of a year on the bus and of writer and teacher George Perec who, in Attention to What? (1973), urges us to found our own anthropology by questioning “our teaspoons”.

(Note to self: Elkin again. Look this up.)

Things mattering and then not mattering

It seems easier on balance not to read the news. Some do and some don't, but it's easier not to. When they look at the planet it's hard to see a place for or trace of the small and babbling pantomime of politics on the newsfeed, and it's as though that pantomime is an insult to the august stage on which it all happens, an assault on its gentleness, or else too insignificant to be bothered with. They might listen to the news and feel instantly tired or impatient. The stories a litany of accusation, angst, anger, slander, scandal that speaks a language both too simple and too complex, a kind of talking in tongues, when compared to the single clear, ringing noted that seems to emit from the hanging planet they now see each morning whey open their eyes. The earth shrugs it off with its every rotation.

I finished reading Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, a couple of weeks ago. I'd picked it up just after, I think, it was awarded the 2024 Booker Prize, but before it was longlisted for the Tournament of Books. 

I started reading it in December while enjoying days at the spa, my copy has the steam-curled pages to prove it. I loved its meditative quality, I drifted on that for a while.

At some point in their stay in orbit there comes for each of them a powerful desire that sets in — a desire never to leave. A sudden ambushing by happiness. They find it everywhere, this happiness, springing forth from the blandest of places — from the experiment decks, from within the sachets of risotto and chicken cassoulet, from the panels of screens, switches and vents, from the brutally cramped titanium, Kevlar and steel tubes in which they're trapped, from the very floors which are walls and the walls which are ceilings and the ceilings which are floors. From the handholds which are footholds which chafe the toes. From the spacesuits, which wait in the airlocks somewhat macabre. Everything that speaks of being is space — which is everything — ambushes them with happiness, and it isn't so much that they don't want to go home but that home is an idea that has imploded — grown so big, so distended and full, that it's caved in on itself.

(I could use that kind of ambush.)

But then, you know, I stopped caring. Not gonna lie, it was kinda boring. I couldn't remember what, if anything, had happened. I wasn't really sure who the characters were or why they mattered — their backstories were irrelevant, none of them had character. 

Do you know what I'll look forward to getting back to, when the time comes? he says. Things I don't need, that's what. Pointlessness. Some pointless ornament on a shelf.

I'm all about pointlessness, plotlessness, slow reading, slow living, stasis. And this novel offers moments of awe. But the world keeps turning. We gaze at the beautiful painting, then move on.

Harvey renders Sagan's Cosmic Character in a grippingly poetic way; one wonders what does human history matter against the cosmos. Not a bit. Except when you're in it, it's everything. 

A projection and a centrifuge

Such that I began to write a book about the real, breathing body of Ravicka, which I couldn't reach by walking toward it and couldn't reach by attending to it, as I might attend to any other subject in my books. I couldn't reach this Ravicka, which was two-dimensional, a projection and a centrifuge. I couldn't reach Ravicka, because it lay in a book and I had placed it there and put inside it the Ravicka I could reach, the Ravicka of our days and our coffee. I wrote the real Ravicka into a book and put inside it the only Ravicka I had. Yet, inside that Ravicka, the one in which I wrote my books (and L. and Z. wrote their books), was that of the first, and though it was placed in a book and had a fiction growing out of it, it was real and breathing: it contained fictions but it breathed and remembered us and held out the possibility of future architecture, where, even though our buildings were in motion and the terrain was constantly reshaping itself, were were part of a conversation. You looked into the book to say these things but the language you needed was outside in the physical city, in that theatre that would not show itself.

Somehow (how? what was I looking for that day? was it possibly to do with The Taiga Syndrome? I wish I could connect the dots, trace the line from the book or author and the keywords I used to search), I fell on a then-freshly-published article (and this tab, along with 112 others, has been open ever since), "The New Patron Saints of Lesbian Fiction" (which namechecks Lauren Elkin — is that how I got here?), which captivated me with its nondefinition of a type of book, my go-to genre: plotless fiction. 

How the fuck had I never heard of Renee Gladman before?

That very afternoon I head to the library to research Havana, and in a slight detour, I find Gladman, and based on the book's size and cover image I choose to bring home with me Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, as if maybe I am crossing some metaphorical bridge, I've always loved bridges; the first of the Ravicka books is not available, and I hope it is not essential to my understanding of this, the third (why would I even think that?).

I am obsessed with this book, I don't understand it at all, like it's all white space and I don't have enough distance to see what's revealed in relief. It's very spatial, I keep thinking of Mieville's The City and the City, like it's a topography overlaying something else (also the paths mapped out in Auster's City of Glass, how many books of late have me hankering nostalgically for a mysterious quest), maybe it's an invisible city a la Calvino, a fiction atop a reality. (I misspell reality as reliaty, as if it's something you can rely on.) 

As a country this was our crisis: getting other people to see what we were seeing.

Weeks later I return the Havana books and decide to recheck the stock of Gladman and find nothing Ravicka-related, whereas my memory has a clear visual on the Houses of Ravicka, which I remember deciding against, because houses versus bridge. I check the online catalogue, and it shows as available. (Mysteriously, yet another Ravicka book is listed but "not available" — not checked out and due to be returned, just not there, I speculate it was never returned.) My intuition leads me to the French shelves. And there it is. One English novel nestled among French translations of Gladman's other work. I leave it there. I'll know where to find it. Only when I return a few days later, it's been correctly reshelved.

It's about writing a book, and the title of the book and the first sentence of the book, and all the words and what the words mean, it's a book about architecture, and the physicality of writing the book — the position of the writer, the space within which the writer is enclosed. And then people are leaving, an exodus, for creative reasons or political ones, they're burning down their houses, but they're not burning. Maybe the houses are metaphorical. Or the burning is.

(I don't know how to write about books anymore, do I want to write about books anymore?, books are mysterious things to write about, what do I hope to prove, not to summarize or convince, maybe distill and understand, sometimes just to remember. I could write about art but I don't know how to write about art, I'd need to learn the language of art, and the language of writing about art, much like I don't know the language of writing about books, look at me writing about writing and about not writing and about not knowing how to write.)

What is the crisis?

There is breathing and not-breathing, the books are bodies, and sometimes the buildings are bodies, and Ravicka is a breathing body, but also the bodies are bodies, and they are lines, like the buildings are numbers, but along with the leaving (disappearing, maybe being disappeared) there is also love and longing, something clandestine, I think.

We were holding space and making space through stillness, looking for structures to reflect what we were seeing, which was nothing.

I want all the Ravicka books so I can tear out their pages and lay them out like a map, and then eat them.

Reviews 
The Rupture 
Music & Literature 

Excerpt
Six enclosures 

The world is a scintillant and fascinating place

Anticipation, when it occurs, often makes me animated and expansive, as if I am perhaps reviving and honing my senses in preparation for the awaited object: yes indeed, the world is a scintillant and fascinating place when a half-remembered mystery leans within reach.

(Her Japanese tapestries. My custom armchair. A former lover. An old book.)

I mostly read Pond, by Claire-Louise Bennett, at the spa, fitting I think because it's so meditative, nothing happens and nothing happens at the spa and it's a good place to contemplate minutiae. I'm not sure how I heard about this book, even though I try to keep track; it may have been in relation, somehow, to the Tournament of Books, possibly mentioned among the many excellent longlisted novels that failed to be shortlisted over the years, or it may have been some forum discussion somewhere regarding books about nothing, which I may have come across while googling something concerning some other book about nothing that I'm reading now (like, say, Orbital, or Ana Patova) or that I have read in the past several months (so many books where nothing happens). Even though I'm reading an ebook borrowed from the library, it thrills me to know Pond has been published as a Fitzcarraldo edition, gawd I love French flaps.

Be careful though, be very careful with flaked almonds; they are not at all suitable for morose of faint-hearted types and shouldn't be flung about like confetti because almonds are not in the least like confetti. On the contrary, flaked almonds aught not to touch one another and should be organised in simple patterns, as on the side of a pavlova, and then they are quite pretty and perfectly innocuous. But shake out a palmful of flaked almonds and you'll see they closely resemble fingernails that have come away from a a hand which has just seen the light of day.

There's a thing I read, and I thought it was in Pond, about a feeling that's like the feeling of having a neighbourhood cat that you see regularly and then you don't for some time, but you know it's there — a kind of comfort in and familiarity with the rhythm of a place — until one day you wonder if it's ok, I haven't see Simone all winter because it's winter but the time before that it had been a while and I was so relieved to finally see her patrolling her usual stretch of sidewalk, I'd wondered if she'd moved away or some other fate befell her. I think the worry was entirely my own, and not in the passage I was looking for, the worry came to me because it reminded me of Simone (Rosie has never warmed to her, Simone is very friendly, a bit of a slut really, with the sweetest little mew). Of course when I went looking for this passage I couldn't find it, just this bit about the cat that walks up and down the drive with you, but I can't think what other thing I've been reading that would evoke this tangential thought.

I won't be able to write emails like that again you see — that's to say I won't be able to write emails like that for the first time again. And that really was what made them so exciting — using language in a way I'd not used it before, to transcribe such an intimate area of my being that I'd never before attempted to linguistically lay bare. It was very nice I must say to every now and then take a break from cobbling together yet another overwrought academic abstract on more or less the same theme in order to set down, so precisely, how and where I'd like my brains to be fucked right out.

It is fitting that this library ebook should expire today, on the last day covered by my spa passport. The passport was unknowingly the smartest recent purchase I made (excepting the custom armchair [the perfect reading nook at last!] since my formerly favourite chaise longue just didn't fit this corner of the room, and this corner was just crying out for a place to sit with a book and a cat; and maybe the porcelain clay), a Christmas gift to myself, I've been going to the spa two or three times a week since, just to relax, I need help relaxing, I didn't know I was going to be laid off, lucky thing too because I've been able to go to the spa any time of day. I'd never really appreciated the sauna until I went to Norway where I'd exit the sauna to plunge into the North Sea, and this was loosely replicated again this past fall in Denmark. My local is a weird little spa, not sure whom I'd recommend it to, it's in an unsuspecting block building, an industrial commercial zone, but I can walk to it from my house in six minutes, which means I can go after dinner or when I roll out of bed in the morning, which is priceless, even if it doesn't have a view over a river and I have to walk past the tracks through the dodgy backstreet with the loading dock for the grocery store to get there. Inside is quite cleverly designed, you have no sense of the traffic that lies just a few metres beyond the slatted wood. In fact I'll bring Pond with me today so I can search one last time for that passage about the cat (maybe it's a dog, and I'm not suggesting that just because the narrator remembers a cat instead of a dog in a book she'd read, the dog was named Lynx after all, I think she's harsh on herself for misremembering, I think that was a perfectly fine detail to stand out, it's more tangible than actions and behaviours, it's only natural for the brain to fill in memories around a keystone, whereas in my case, I'm not frustrated with focusing on the "wrong" detail but that I can't find the source of it at all, this passage I remember may even be about a person, it's just that it reminded me of Simone, who happens to be a cat. Was it another book entirely? But I associate it with this one, and also I feel like I felt this feeling of association while at the spa, because this is the book I've spent most of my time with, albeit relaxed and unfocused time, an environment that nurtures looseness (of muscle, mind), a loosening of hangups (and associations), the brain fog shifts into brain fuzziness (altogether softer, kinder, warmer). Or is it possible I hadn't read anything at all to prompt this "remembered feeling"? My mind simply wandered to thoughts of home and the nieghbourhood and I thought of Simone, and in a bit of reverse trickery my brain associated this sequence to a passage I'd read rather than freely admit my thoughts went to Simone (not even my own cat!) of their own accord.

Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that's not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream.

One of the best things about reading Pond was that it led me to discover Claire-Louise Bennett's essay A Formal Feeling: Inside the world of Louise Bourgeois, which is stunning to me, stunningly weird as a review of a book or an exhibition or an experience, by which I mean beautiful, and it makes me think, for once, about how other people approach Louise Bourgeois and how art makes other people feel something completely different than what I feel, and sometimes it seems lesser and less valid, but sometimes it is more and deeper and I think my own thoughts are quite small by comparison. I think more reviews should be written that way.

I'm going to check out Checkout 19 now.

I think I liked sitting there actually; I think I felt as if I'd just come home from school on a Thursday. Nobody was taking any notice of me yet there was a lovely comforting sensation that beneficent things were being done for me somewhere. I think, as human experiences go, that is one of my favourite ones.

Excerpts
From Morning, Noon & Night 

Reviews 
Fiction That Will Make You Feel Pleasantly Insane (The New Yorker) 
Hmmmm, Stylish (London Review of Books) 

Understand the edges

You can't stay married to someone for ever just because they climb out of your attic one afternoon.

Or can you? How else do we make these decisions? The Husbands, by Holly Gramazio, was fun. So many husbands!

I probably would not have discovered or picked up this book were it not on the Tournament of Books longlist (it did not make the cut to final competition). The Husbands veers toward introspective rom-com.

She doesn't always like the new versions of herself, but they help her understand the edges of who she might be.

I love that our protagonist gets caught up in practicalities, googles her predicament when she can, and moves forward thoughtfully, when the science-fictiony multiverse premise could easily have taken an action thriller turn (à la Blake Crouch's Dark Matter), which genre I'm quite done with (whether on page or screen, I've lost all interest in extended chase and combat sequences, shoot-em-ups, and explosions).

[I don't have much to say about this novel (in fact, in general, I find I get hung up on writing about the wrong books here), but it did get me thinking more about editioning (inspired by how the husbands are swapped into her life, the subtle ripple effects of making those substitutions, as well as how any story's theme can be played out on range from quiet to bombastic). In terms of casting sculptures, I am working out whether I am producing the same sculpture in different ways. When do they become different sculptures? My sculptures are "separated at birth" as they emerge from the same mould. How do I talk about them, practically — a series, a sequence, versions, editions, variations?] 

Author interview.

Check out the Husband Generator:

An architect, though! What a perfect job for a husband. Ambitious yet concrete, artistic yet practical, glamorous yet without an industry-wide drug problem.

No one understands their own decisions

The truth is no one knows when they are making their biggest or most significant decisions. No one understands their own decisions. The woman danced with him; this was what the man from the coast had told me, in a café surrounded by windows that opened to the ocean.

I remember the salt. I remember the linen curtains that gave shape to the ocean wind. Someone said that when we open windows wide, the salt helps us remember who we are. Or how.

[Conversely, some of the seemingly big decisions of our lives end up being inconsequential. Many decisions have been made for me, some less trivial than others. Changing my employment, then terminating my employment, not my decision. But leaving this island for another... because the salt of the ocean wind may help me remember who I am... this is mine.]

The desire between one thing and another. The desire of bodies and, at the same time, the desire to narrate bodies.

Reading The Taiga Syndrome, by Cristina Rivera Garza, is like walking through a dream, or rewatching Last Year at Marienbad, or rereading a book of fairy tales, the dark kind, where all the pages have been reassembled in the wrong order. Like Paul Auster's City of Glass, if New York were a forest, and Auster were a woman and had more depth.

I had no ideas who the others were. But my morbid fascination thrilled me. Who can resist observing the original body? A body without a social context?

A woman is contracted by a man to track down his second wife who had left or disappeared or been led astray, but I cannot shake the feeling that she may be tailing a woman who may or may not be herself, a past self she is struggling to find her way to.

Their last communication came from a telegram office in a border town about two hundred kilometers away. The telegram, addressed to the man who had hired me to investigate the case, said briefly and somewhat obliquely that they were never coming back: "WHAT ARE WE LETTING IN WHEN WE SAY GOODBYE?"

I took the case because I have always had an all-consuming weakness for forms of writing no longer in use: radiograms, stenography, telegrams. As soon as I placed my hands on the faded paper, I began to dream. The tips of my fingers skimmed the creases of the paper; the stale smell or age. Something hidden. Who would set out on such a journey? That couple, of course. Our of everyone, only those two. From wat place, so far away in space, so far away in time, had this fistful of capital letters been sent? And what were the two of them hoping for? What had they let into their lives?

Hoping to find a way out? They had let in the end, and the beginning of what comes after the end, clearly. 

[My friends and I had joked that my employment should have been terminated by telegram. It was a last-minute "townhall" meeting, silent while we waited for the number of attendees to climb, then grimly silent as we realized the number wasn't expected to climb much more. "If you're on this call, today is your last day." But a telegram! In all caps. IF YOU'RE RECEIVING THIS TELEGRAM, YOUR EMPLOYMENT HAS BEEN TERMINATED. Or more ominously, TODAY IS YOUR LAST DAY. But what is the end of employment compared to the end of love, the end of a life you thought you were living in love? It's trivial. Coincidentally, a few days ago, I came across a telegram while going through my mother's papers, a telegram from Poland on the occasion of my father's death in 1977, "words of compassion" (rather, "condolences"). Or "today is your last day." In all caps. Maybe every telegram sends the same message: "WHAT ARE WE LETTING IN WHEN WE SAY GOODBYE?"]

Let me note, I love how prominently "body" features. Elbows. Spit. Cartilage. Vomit.

The picture showed that the skull, a cave of bones, looked strong enough to offer refuge. There, a body or the image of a body could curl up comfortably.

I wish I could sculpt these images, these noises:

I remember the movement of jaws, constant and dreadful. Opening and closing. Chewing. Swallowing. I remember how the voracity of my own chewing made me close my eyes. Sometimes pleasure is like that. Above all, I remember the sound of lips, gnawing and talking at the same time, and the grease shining on those lips. And how my food slid down my esophagus, slowly, before falling into the cruel mechanism of my stomach. All those liquids. All that acid. I remember the noise of gold chains around forearms and wrists. How the metal sparkled at that time of day. What time? What day?

There's a playlist. Presented as a chapter, or maybe an appendix to the narrator's report, I rather wish I'd known about it before the end.

In other readers of this short novel is evoked Anna Kavan's Ice, Tarkovsky's Stalker. It's Borgesian and Lynchian. It performs weird things with language. It tells the truth.

But what's it about? Walking into the forest. Following a trail of breadcrumbs into the forest. Going through the forest. Maybe this is how you find yourself when love leaves you.

But what, really, is the end of falling out of love?

[. . .]

"Even falling out of love finally ends." Had I really told him that? My voice softer. Placating someone is also a spiritual exercise. Look at this: your knees. They are used for kneeling upon reality, also for crawling, terrified. You use them to sit on a lotus flower and say goodbye to the immensity.

See also
LARB: The Intense Atmospheres of Language: Cristina Rivera Garza’s "The Taiga Syndrome"